


Catching Signals that Sound in the Dark

by j_marquis



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-17
Updated: 2012-07-17
Packaged: 2017-11-10 04:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/462274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_marquis/pseuds/j_marquis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of his brother's apparent death, Mycroft writes a letter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catching Signals that Sound in the Dark

Sherlock,  
It has been years since I have thought to write you. I suppose it should not matter now, considering the circumstances, but there is a part of me that holds on to childhood sentiment, despite my best efforts otherwise. Mummy told me to protect you. I don't think either of us ever told you that. Everything I did was to protect you. You may well have hated me, and I understand that. So often we hate the things that seek to keep us from harm. You seem so small on that mortuary slab, I suppose for all the mockery you made of my size I never thought how tiny you had always remained. Even as an infant, so small, you could hardly breathe. I was eight. Sometimes I would look in on you in that case of tubes and wires that would keep you alive and wonder why I was never allowed to wrap your fragile hand in mine.

Mother always called you her impossible child. Impossible from birth, too small to live and yet you did. Chaotic and madcap and curious, with those pale eyes you could get anything you wanted. I would have given you the world when you were a child, and it seemed some days you wanted it handed to you on a silver platter. 'Can I have that?' You would ask, so that you could take it apart and see how it worked, whether it was a pen or a goldfish or a toy 'What makes it work Mycroft? What makes it go?' You only ever spoke to ask questions, demand knowledge, strangely fitting for such an impossible child. With that incessant drive to know everything you had the world wrapped around your tiny fingers and you never knew how much you had. How much more you could have asked for.

I never thought to resent you for what happened later. For the fact that Mummy never really recovered, for taking the attentions of the nannies and the tutors with your constant questions and habits of getting into places you had no right being, for late night hospital stays because you had fallen from a book case or gotten bit by whatever animal you were trying to catch in the gardens. Always you would smile at me, and laugh, 'Mycroft look,' hands bloodied but you had managed to catch it, wrist broken but you had gotten the book down, you cared so little for your own well being that I would cart you off to accidents and emergencies myself, let you continue about with your discoveries and experiments despite injury or illness, or, on one memorable occasion, poison. I suppose I should have known that impetuous nature would not fade with age. That I would always have to be the one to drag you to accidents and emergencies and ensure that you at least tried to remain among the living.

I understood the curiosity. I understood your need to see everything in the world around you and I understood your distaste for your peers, knowing you were so much more than they were. I had been through much the same, but I had adapted. I had turned my intelligence to social graces, manipulating those around me to see me as a sort of leader. You never did learn that trick and their awe of your intelligence turned quickly to scorn. But you were always such a show-off, ready to rub it in the faces of the others that you knew their secrets. At least, at first. As you grew older you spoke less and less, tried to avoid people and interaction. I remember once being summoned away from University to make you leave your room, shut up in there for a month at age seventeen. 

Years ago, when you were so very small, you would sneak into my room late into the night and curl beside me, 'Big brother, I cannot sleep, my mind will not stand still.' Like it was a separate creature that I could somehow control. I would run my fingers through your unruly curls until you slept, restless and full of movement, your wild mind swept away by dreams. I did all that I could to make it easy, I knew what you bore behind those wide eyes was a hard burden. After all, I had been much the same, once. 

You asked me once, after Father's funeral, why I hadn't cried for him. I couldn't. Death was the natural order of things, and perhaps Father's had not been strictly natural, political assassinations so rarely were, but it was inevitable, and nothing I could change. Mourning was counter-productive. After all, you had not mourned either. I had always known you and Father were not the best of companions, he had never really understood the chaotic streak as unmanageable as your dark curls. You had never understood his desire to maintain order and keep up appearances. Both of you were the type to lash out, to find the weak spots and dig into them with a few well-placed words to break each other down. And so often you did, it made sense that you would not mourn. You became too skilled at hiding your feelings from any of us. And I realized you were not above drugging yourself to quiet that racing mind. 

I lost you that year. Lost you entirely, to my own studies, to my position of power sought only so that I was able to protect you. It never occurred to me, as so often it did not, to protect you from yourself. Hospital beds and deep, scathing red track marks on your skinny arm. Had I known, I could have helped. It was the most useless I had ever been, watching as life abandoned you for seconds that felt like eons. Kingdoms could rise and fall as I watched breath leave you, breath given to the drugs that numbed your mind. That incredible mind made broken and dimmed from chemical compounds, narcotics you never should have reduced to. I had never been able to save you. The only thing Mother ever asked of me that I could not provide. Sometimes in the long hospital stays that peppered our childhood, it would hurt to look at you, know that by all means you should not survive. You didn't seem to know how much we fought to keep you with us. With Mother often unwell and Father away, it fell to me to quell that streak of self-destruction.

But it did not mean you had to alter your mind, chemicals and syringes and opiates meant to quiet what you could not control. And that was always what this was, a means to control, to cope with what you had been given rather than use it, manipulate it, become something bigger than yourself. You wanted to become merely human. To force yourself to deal with the ordinary. And I knew what it was like to fear for you because the greatest danger to you had always been that wild brilliance. How could a mind like that strive for so much less? I did all I could, bribed away dealers and kept the police away from you, though you did nothing to help yourself. Obviously, drug addled and addicted to danger, your own cleverness. I should have known I would be sitting in a morgue one day wondering what I could say to make it less. Writing this letter with a hand that shakes for the impossible grief.

I was stupid to think you could change. To think that we could get you clean, the Detective Inspector who brought you to me, drugged out of your mind and dying wanted so much for you to recover. He told me that even in this state you were one of the most intelligent creatures he had ever come across. Foolish, I let him get you clean of the drugs, or mostly, rather, it was a habit you never truly left behind. There were still nights when I feared for you, hurt for you, scratched at my arm as though I could feel the needle slipped against my vein as you would. But there was hope, I still held to hope, hope that grew when, for the first time in your life, you had a friend.

John, so sickeningly ordinary. I saw the way you looked at the unassuming doctor, everything that hid behind your eyes. Did you ever tell him, I wonder, how you felt, what you wanted? I doubt it. You were so intensely personal, so hidden, so sure that no one you loved would ever love you in return. I doubt if you ever admitted it to yourself. But everyone saw. And he looked at you much the same, you never noticed. Or perhaps that it was you could not see. Always you held your self-diagnosed sociopathy around you like a security blanket, so ready to hide from the world and never make a real connection and pretend you did not need it. I may have encouraged that, something I have come to regret. But caring is the cruelest disadvantage, I know now, because I have always cared.

I would beg to bring you back, plead, offer my life in place of yours, take myself to the ends of the earth, to Hell and to Heaven if I thought there was a way to have a little brother again. Senseless pleas, pointless and impossible. It does not do to dwell in the realm of fantasy. Death is an inevitability, something that touches everyone, and you have been running from it for years now, weaving in and out of his grasp like you thought this would never end. Like you could run hand in hand with your Doctor, your Soldier forever chasing killers. Death finds us all, Dear Brother, quicker when we tease it the way you always did. I wish I had found a way to grant you the invincibility you thought you had.

I failed you, Sherlock. I know that now, and I am sorry. The one thing Mother asked of me, I could never do. You were too much a danger to yourself, things I should have seen, might have been able to stop this. I hate every second I sit in this room, watching you still on the mortuary slab, pale eyes wide and unseeing.

Goodbye, brother. I suspect I shall be seeing you again soon.


End file.
